Lady Bruins stumble in bid for state title

Early turnovers killed the Lady Bruins on Wednesday as they lost to the Lady Vikings of Mazama 37-76 to drop to the consolation bracket of the OSAA 4A championships.

The Bruins had five turnovers early in the game on traveling and double-dribble calls and were quickly trailing the Vikings 7-18 in the first quarter.

"The easy answer is, we're not the first team to come up on this stage and get stage fright," Head Coach Chris Schofield said. "We knew that nerves would be an issue; we just wanted to keep it close enough early on, until we could get settled down."

The Bruins scored another 7 points in the second quarter before heading into the locker room, but allowed the Vikings to score twice as many to head into the half, trailing 14-32.

With Mallory McDonald leading the Bruins' scoring with 7 points - 5 of those 7 came from the free-throw line - the Bruins were hard pressed to catch the Vikings despite increasing the defensive pressure in the third quarter.

"We didn't do enough little things," Schofield said. "We didn't box out, we weren't rebounding, we weren't moving our feet on defense. They are a really good team and we had to do the little things to keep up with a team like that."

The fourth quarter found the Bruins scoring a little more than twice as many points as they had in any of the previous three quarters but they were unable to catch the Vikings as the quarter score was 16-19.

Conspicuously absent in the game was the Bruins' full-court pressure defense. Schofield explained that when the Bruins had played Mazama earlier in the year, the Lady Vikings had picked apart the Bruins' "gold" defense.

"The problem is, without pressing we didn't work as hard in the half-court game as we would have in the full-court game," he said. "We're not good enough or big enough to beat anyone if we don't work hard. I thought our energy level was way down today."

"We just have to keep our heads up," freshman guard Drew Farmer said after the loss. "We have to put this behind us and have more energy tomorrow. We have to come out and be strong and not let them beat us again."

Schofield agreed.

"The thing we talked about with this group is, Mazama can only beat us once unless we let them beat us twice," he said. "We can put this behind us and play again or we can be down on ourselves and let them beat us again tomorrow with our attitude."

The Bruins will play again today (March 7) against the loser of the Cascade and LaSalle Prep game. That game is scheduled for 9 a.m.